Netanyahu and the “Martyr-State” Myth

Those trying to generate hysteria in the United States about Iran’s nuclear program regularly play the crazy Muslim card. Iran, they imply, will become the Tsarnaev brothers with nuclear weapons.

Indeed, hard-liners are happy to go beyond this and to insist that Iran’s leadership is even more suicidal than that, which is what supposedly makes them impossible to deter. As Scott points out, there is no truth in this claim.

Practicing dissimulation doesn’t make a person suicidal or prone to attacking others. Quite the contrary. The original purpose for it in Shi’ism was to avoid persecution and death. For Helprin to use that in the same sentence with references to martyrdom suggests that he doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. How a regime uses its soldiers in a conventional war of self-defense doesn’t tell us anything about their willingness to use a nuclear weapon. As I have said before, the veneration of martyrdom in Iranian culture is as strong as it is because of their Shi’ism and their comemoration of the death of Husayn (Hossein), whom they revere as their second imam. When Helprin babbles on about Iranians being “martyrdom-obsessed,” he wants to give the misleading impression that this a country and a regime intent on dying. The regime, like any other regime, is intent on self-preservation.

The idea that Iran’s government is willing to invite its own annihilation in nuclear war requires putting enormous confidence in “a few neoconservative op-eds and a report by a right-wing Israeli think tank, whose claims have been bounced endlessly around the internet,” which is the origin of the “martyr-state” myth. Netanyahu probably felt confident repeating such bogus claims before the U.N. because he knew that his main audience in the United States wouldn’t know that he was repeating pure propaganda.

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4 Responses to Netanyahu and the “Martyr-State” Myth

If Iran were solely interested in collective suicide, they could do so now by launching conventional missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, inviting a massive retaliation. Why spend billions of dollars on a nuclear program, and forgo billions of dollars in oil revenues just to commit suicide? Unless, they are going through all this trouble because they believe it is in their national interest to do so.

If Iran were solely interested in collective suicide, they would be history already.

It is interesting that a fringe power group in Israel would be so committed to the practice of inventing a lie about others and repeating it often. Maybe not so fringe when it comes to power, but at least in terms of the general population.

Two comments – first, somebody made a joke about the Ayatollah Khomeini surviving in a violent place and time into his 80’s, that he wasn’t much of a martyr. Second, ‘millenarianism’ – sounds like right-wing evangelical/fundamentalists in the USA (is there *any* right-wing propaganda recently that isn’t 100% freudian projection?).